Let’s Not Get It On: The Indefensible Sex Scene

Related Books:

Literature about sex, no matter who has written it, is almost always terrible, and everybody knows it. This is widely known and acknowledged — even on this very site, by both the great Sonya Chung and Julia Fierro. We’re all so tuned into its legendary badness that even relatively minor offenses in the realm of sex writing annoy us far more than other writerly transgressions. An imperfect depiction of sex is far worse for some reason than an inept description of someone entering a room or having a marital spat or whatever other things a book might get wrong without anyone disapproving quite so mercilessly.

There is sufficient scorn for bad sex writing that the Literary Review famously awards an annual prize for it. Though “prize” seems like a funny term for becoming the object of public ridicule and mockery. It’s a missing component of the human brain, the ability to recognize one’s own completely botched attempts at writing about penetration, blow jobs, and the rest of it. Most writers, one must assume, push themselves away from their desks at the end of their earnest writing sessions and think to themselves, Job well done. Only to discover a few months or years later that they have gone and humiliated themselves, at least according to a bunch of smug bastards on the other side of the ocean.

Which isn’t to say I’m not in sympathy with the smug bastards. In writing my own book full of sex, there was almost no one I could turn to for inspiration. There wasn’t a single book I looked to and thought, “What I’m trying to do is write sex like she did or like he did.” There weren’t even movies and TV shows I felt had handled it the way I wanted to see it done. You know what movies and TV shows are really brilliant at capturing? Bad sex. They’re great at doing awkward, depressing, uncomfortable sex scenes where everyone is sort of strangled in the sheets, and the women are keeping their breasts covered, and everyone is obviously faking their orgasms and not getting what they want. And you know that the movie is probably about a breakup that hasn’t happened yet but soon will.

The other thing that movies and TV shows are good at nailing down is the kind of phonily intense sex scene in which the involved parties are grabbing fistfuls of hair and grunting and slamming each other around because their passion, their chemistry, is so overpowering it can’t be softened by courtesy, affection, or fear of causing actual physical harm. Often, the players in these scenes remain largely clothed, too ravenous for one another’s genitals to waste time undressing. They merely make a path towards penetration, him through his fly, her with underwear stretched between her thighs or, better yet, ripped and lying in tatters nearby. This type of sex scene is perhaps best exemplified by a sequence in David Cronenberg’sA History of Violence in which the two (needless to say, gorgeous) leads have a ferocious and impassioned sexual encounter on a wooden staircase — quite possibly the worst place on the planet to have sex. The only version of this scene I could find on YouTube is dubbed in another language, but the familiarity of such brutal fucking transcends language, and should be familiar to anyone who sees it.

Though my own sex scenes weren’t written with titillation in mind, if I had to choose a point of inspiration for them, a certain kind of amateur pornography comes closest, the kind where you actually believe they’ve forgotten the camera is there, and the effect is that of a documentary. Or maybe even hidden camera porn, where one guy seems to know they’re being recorded, but the other fellow seems not to know. And they experience a kind of typical sex exchange that feels true somehow. Even thought it’s not, of course, true at all, and might in fact be so deceptive as to be unethical and/or illegal. The ordinariness of their interaction is what is so striking. Stripped of performance and professional lighting, moments like these can never be accused of the most common pitfalls of bad sex writing: pretension, mushiness, cornball romance, those absurd oh-yeah-you-like-that-don’t-you, uh-huh-you-know-I-do-big-daddy exchanges.

While I am somewhat in sympathy with the smug bastards calling out the writers who do it badly, I experience an even greater depth of fellow feeling for those who have tried to get it right and failed. Because it’s really hard getting it right, if it can be done at all. Everyone knows what sex is like, and we all know that, almost always, something’s off in the way it’s described on the page. How seldom it is truly captured — the physical sensation, the feelings, the smells. Yes, there are smells! Tasteful writers don’t mention them, but they’re there, and they can fill a room. And this — gentility — is perhaps the worst offense of all when writing about sex. How can you take me there if the word “loins” is used even once? How can you take me there if you won’t admit that there are smells? And pubic hairs that must occasionally be plucked from the tip of your tongue or hocked up discreetly in the shower sometime later.

I’m no different than anyone else who has waded into this treacherous territory. I’m quite happy with my sex scenes. I think they’re just terrific, actually. I think they’re right in their frankness, in their zooming in and zooming out. In the smells they attempt to conjure and fan out at readers from the page, however subtly. I think they capture something real and true. But we all know what the odds say about the likelihood of their success. Take the Magic Eight Ball in hand, give it a shake, and ask the question. Wait a moment for the answer to bob up through inky, blue waters and flatten against the window. “Outlook not so good.”

1.
In Malcolm Mackay’sEvery Night I Dream of Hell, the anti-hero lives in the shadows of the Glasgow underworld. An insider in a criminal gang known as the “Jamieson Organisation,” Nate Colgan thinks he has seen how bad it can get. Published in the U.S. this April, Every Night I Dream of Hell is the latest addition to a sprawling field of work labelled “Tartan Noir,” a term said to encompasses works from disparate group of authors — including Denise Mina, Ian Rankin, and Peter May — it’s scope ranging from the highlands and islands to Scotland’s major cities.

“It’s a useful term for marketing a book so I understand why it’s used, why that’s how my books are described, because they’re crime set in Scotland,” said Mackay during a Skype interview. “But really, Scottish crime writing is a very broad church.”

He’s right. This small rainy country with a population of five million spawns many different kinds of crime writing, from the cynical humanity of Ian Rankin and the mocking insights of Alexander McCall Smith to the fiery social and political conscience shown by Denise Mina. It seems an insulting act to shoehorn them all under the umbrella Tartan Noir.

Mina wrote about Glasgow’s notorious Red Road flats, which were recently controversially demolished. A plan to make a celebration and display of the destruction for The Commonwealth Games was shelved as being in enormously bad taste, but that it was even mooted perhaps shows how little respect was given to the residents of these tower blocks. “Crime fiction is the fiction of social history,” said Mina in a piece in The New York Times on the rise of Scottish detective fiction. “Societies get the crimes they deserve.”

Rankin, the king of Tartan Noir, who coined the term in a meeting with James Ellroy, thinks it is a catch-all which cannot do justice to the rich variety of crime writing coming out of this small and rainy country.

When I interviewed Rankin for The Awl, he described the term as “a lazy shorthand way of talking about Scottish Crime Fiction…Alexander McCall Smith’s novels aren’t noir, as they’re very light in tone. They’re still crime fiction set in Scotland.”

2.Noir came from L.A: a city of lights, dreams, and angels, both fallen and ruling. One of the largest internal migrations in American history saw people flood to California pursuing economic opportunity. A real-life battle between the LAPD and the criminal underworld was soon in full swing in this new thirsty city, where water was one of the most precious resources. Writers like Raymond Chandler were attracted by the seedy romance of this battle between the fallen angels and the authorities, who often were just as corrupt. Chandler created Marlow, a shadowy figure who was able to move between both worlds, seeing both with a human and sarcastic eye. (John Buntin wrote a fantastic book on the “seductive” city of L.A. and it’s noir, for those who want to read more.)

How does this glamorous medium created in a shimmering city translate to Tartan Noir, then? Noir is gangsters and glamour and beautiful blondes in a glimmering, sprawling city. It is Ellroy and Chandler and the horror of Roman Polanski’sChinatown. Tartan is the pattern on shortbread tins, or the hairy friendly blanket my dog sleeps on. There’s a something of a disconnect between the warmth of Tartan and the broken-glass cold of noir — and that makes the term work.

Scotland is a nation with a population of five million, L.A. a city with a population of four million. Noir will have different characteristics where the world is less crowded — there are vast amounts of uninhabited space outside of Scotland’s cities — but even so, Glasgow, setting of Every Night I Dream of Hell, was for a time the violent crime capital the U.K. (It was supplanted by West Yorkshire in 2016.)

“I think a lot of Glasgow’s reputation comes from how it used to be,” says Mackay. A native of the Scottish Island Lewis, Mackay had only visited Glasgow once before writing his first novel, The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, part of a trilogy set in the city.

“I wanted to write about gangsters,” he says, “and Glasgow is a big city, it was the natural location.”

Would he write a crime novel set in the island town where he lives ? He laughs, Stornoway’s a small island, and while he likes to live there, he doesn’t see it as a Mafia hotbed.

This doesn’t mean the islands are not written about by crime writers. Peter May used the rugged isolation to write a trilogy set on Lewis, the loneliness and exposure of the island perfect companions for a haunted detective. The May novels may lack the urban hardness of Mackay’s stories, but May’s Lewis trilogy has a soft-focussed menace, as though seen through wind and the driving rain that is so frequent on Scotland’s Western Isles. Los Angeles and the Scottish Islands may seem a thousands of miles from one another (figuratively as well as literally), however they both share a certain allure that fuels the imagination, perhaps more so even for those who have never been there.

That one term could encompass both writers seems improbable — but both personify Tartan crime, with a glamour that sees the glimmer of a puddle rather than the ritzy glitz of bright lights and diamonds. I know this country — I have lived here half my life, and I know how the light can change in an instant, how everything else here is changeable too, how Scotland is a nation of bleak grey skies and brilliant sunsets, cities where motorways slice confusingly through the middle and places that look so remote and crater covered they could be mistaken, in certain lights, for the moon.

15 comments:

I remember thinking that the sex scene in Atonement is surprisingly good. McEwan has a scientist’s eye for detail, and a certain amount of clinical dispassion seems to lend itself to writing about sex well.

My nom was worst sex writer is Paul Auster, who, despite his obvious brilliance, continues to write sex scenes between old men who are invalids and beautiful blonde women in which the men are still studs in spit of their infirmaries. This tic of his is why I will never cop to him being one of my favorites writers. He is still way too invested in his virility for me to take him seriously.

Like taking a shit, let’s leave sex scenes out of novels. Allude to sex, but don’t write it. I end up just saying “yucko”. Having said that, I am reading The Seed Collector’s by Scarlett Thomas and she (so far) writes, alludes, to sex rather well because she is funny as hell about it.

Don’t know what kind of sex you’re familiar with, HC (laugh) but I’d compare sex to another natural necessity (and aestheticized pleasure) such as *eating*… and why should there be a prohibition against portraying it or a tendency to freight its portrayal with mystical (or grandiose) nature metaphors that obscure, rather than reveal, its essence? Sex is always a dialogue (though it’s not always an articulate, imaginative or friendly one) and dialogues are natural to the novel.

“Like taking a shit, let’s leave sex scenes out of novels. Allude to sex, but don’t write it. I end up just saying “yucko”. Having said that, I am reading The Seed Collector’s by Scarlett Thomas and she (so far) writes, alludes, to sex rather well because she is funny as hell about it.”

Tastefully withdrawing before the sex occurs is the usual tack, and it works pretty well. That said, I’m all for sex scenes if the author is good at writing them and if the scene is germane to the overall narrative. In the same sense, I’m not even opposed to a good (it better be really good) taking a shit scene–Joyce’s scene with Bloom in the outhouse is one of the best in Ulysses.

Oh man! Page 68 of Scarlett Thomas’s The Seed Collectors: “He shits in the spare toilet before joining her”. The rest of the paragraph is pretty funny, so Scarlett gets a pass. Steve Garvey, no doubt Joyce got it right but the fact that you’ve read Ulysses shows you are way out of my league, I just can’t get through it. Steve Augustine, I will read anything you write because you are smart and funny and you make me laugh.

God I can’t believe a guy just took a shit in the book I am reading!

Oh one more thing, men who write from the female POV, must we always have our period by page 5? We truly do not think about, other than “fuck, again?” And then we sigh. And sometimes book off sick. And stay in bed with tea and a novel. Ok maybe that’s just me.

There’s a little bit of Aunt Flow, her troubles, and her great blessings, back in my comment to Jacob Lambert’s very intriguing “A Fictional Oral History of the Photograph I found in an Old Carl Hiassen Paperback.” (May 27, 2016). Just couldn’t resist pointing you to it. Someone called my comment “atmospheric” which covers a lot of ground. (There are more mute people in the photo who need a story, what do you say, Heather? Anybody? : ) )

(Come to think of it, Joyce’s Molly Brown commented on this topic on June 16, 1904!)

In the summer of 2013, I walked into Parnassus, one of the numerous second-hand bookshops on Cape Cod. Its front room is a gold-mine of rare editions of literature dedicated to the Cape and Massachusetts. Of those was a Houghton, Mifflin 1904 edition of Henry David Thoreau’sCape Cod, in two volumes. The covers were cloth bound and embossed with a golden art-nouveau design. I ran my finger down the discolored spines and begged the shopkeeper down to a slightly more affordable price-tag before emerging from the store with the volumes wrapped in a brown paper bag.

Buying Thoreau’s Cape Cod on Cape Cod resonates with a predictable sentimentality that I’m all too aware of. It too closely resembles what I think of as Thoreauvian pilgrimage practices: the hajj to Walden Pond, the leaving of pencils on his grave in Sleepy Hollow. What Lawrence Buell has, tongue possibly in cheek, characterized as the procedures of an “American cult.” Having spent over five years of my life reading Thoreau for a graduate degree I often resist the mawkishness that so often accompanies the hagiographic version of Thoreau, one that can be completely detached from Thoreau himself.

Yet how could I ignore this earnest imbrication of events weighted by the volumes in my hands? I stood there in the sunshine and knowingly held a little bit of Cape Cod’s history: from place of conception through posthumous publication in Boston’s Ticknor and Field’s 1865 edition to this lush 1904 reissuing, complete with water color illustrations, that had found its way to a bookstore on the Cape some 100 years later; a place that no doubt would be unrecognizable to Thoreau today even as he correctly predicted that “the time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the sea-side” and then incorrectly predicted that “at present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them.” The Cape Cod in my hands opened into a landscape that felt completely unrelated to the historical bohemian zenith I was visiting.

The truth is that Cape Cod is not necessarily the book that springs to mind when thinking about Thoreau today, even as we arrive at its 150-year anniversary. Its publication brought together a compilation of essays that he had sporadically been working on for over a decade. Thoreau’s first encounter with the Cape began about two years after he left his sojourn at Walden Pond and was living back in Concord with his family in their new house on Maine Street. He decided to visit the Cape in order to “acquaint himself with the ocean and sea shore,” as his biographer Walter Harding explains. After that first visit in 1849, accompanied by his close friend Ellery Channing, Thoreau went again in 1850 on his own and one final time in 1855 with Channing again.

His excursions became the basis of some lectures which he gave at the Concord Lyceum, where his audience, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “laughed till they cried.” Then a short series of essays (that were to later become the first four chapters of the book) were published in Putnam’s Magazine in 1855 before being halted due to their irreverent take on Cape Codders. Thoreau pokes fun at the toothless women he sees (“but we respect them not the less for all that; our own dental system is far from perfect”); at their husbands who look “pickled;” at the dry, bare landscape across Dennis and Chatham; at the scarcity of decent meals (“this is where [fish] are cured and where, sometimes, travelers are cured of eating them”); at the torrential rain, which means he can only imagine the sun and long distance views that the local guide books promise him. Where his oratory audience had been amused, his readership, it seems, was less so. As a result, it wasn’t till after Thoreau’s death in 1862 that the full series of essays saw publication as Cape Cod, edited and compiled by his sister Sophia and his frequent travel companion, Channing.

Like so much of Thoreau’s work, Cape Cod doesn’t fit into any one generic category. It skirts the lines of travel narrative and satire, of nature writing and natural history, of disaster reporting and of philosophy. The more embroiled you let yourself get into his sentences and paragraphs the more you realize you’re witnessing an iridescent game of genre-bending. When I read it, it’s not just the writing that feels like it’s curving out from under me. Thoreau’s descriptions of the landscape are weighted with multiple historical records, contemporary moments, his own experience of it and of others’, none of which harmoniously co-exist; it is a stratigraphic layering of perspectives that leaves the landscape at odds with itself. It unsettled the way I walked across the sand dunes that summer, my own encounters with the ocean, my sense of place against the extortionately priced parking sites next to bayside beaches, against the wide roads and chain shopping centers, against the festive madness of Provincetown.

The same summer I visited the Cape, Norman Mailer’s five-bedroom water-front 1930s-built Provincetown house went on sale for $3.9 million. I joked with my friends that it was a steal and we came up with outlandish scenarios on how to raise the funds to buy it. In Cape Cod, meanwhile, Thoreau is horrified at the houses he sees in 1850s Provincetown as they are “surrounded by fish-flakes close up to the sills on all sides, with only a narrow passage two or three feet wide, to the front door” and mentions that “the outward aspects of the houses and shops frequently suggested a poverty” albeit “which their interior…disproved.” From where Thoreau was standing, flooded with salted fish, the cool, artsy vibe of P-town was still about 40 years away from its inception, let alone its eventual gentrification. In 1873 the railroad would finally stretch itself all the way to Provincetown and by 1899 Charles Hawthorne, the impressionist painter, would open up his art school, thus forging the town’s reputation as an art colony. By the 1910s, Provincetown would be awash with writers, artists, and actors, mostly from Greenwich Village, and through the decades that followed they just kept coming. Today the names are all too familiar to us: Eugene O’Neil, Tennessee Williams, John Dos Passos, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock…the list goes on. There would be few places in America that would become so influential on its art scene. There would, in fact, be no place quite as fashionable as Provincetown. The incongruity between Thoreau’s pre-industrial moments on the Cape and the explosion of development that fundamentally shapes the town people visit today is hard to fathom.

Thoreau had a similar crisis of incongruity, viewing the landscape in front of him in comparison to the records provided by visitors from the 1600s.

It is remarkable that the Pilgrims (or their reporter) describe this part of the Cape, not only as well wooded, but as having a deep and excellent soil, and hardly mention the word sand.

Here I find myself converging with Thoreau on his Cape Cod. The sand is undeniably everywhere, the roads are filmed with it, the house we stay in seems to rise up from it. And Thoreau mentions it constantly, as though unable to grasp it ubiquitousness. When I see the pedestrians walk barefoot on the sand-dusted streets I am willing to believe Thoreau’s comedic claim that “in some pictures of Provincetown the persons of the inhabitants are not drawn below the ankles, so much being supposed to be buried in the sand.” Thoreau and I meet in our incredulity that a floral fecundity ever existed here, witness to the drastic deforestation wielded in a distant past.

But the sand is also where Thoreau unsettles me the most. The first essay in Cape Cod opens upon a violently impacted vista: the scene of a recent shipwreck on Cohassett, a beach strewn with dead bodies, the tremendously sad end to the Irish St John not making it to the promised land. By the first few pages we are introduced to “the coiled-up wreck of a human hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the bone and muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless, — merely red and white, — with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, dead-lights;” Thoreau relentlessly unveils the horrors of the wreck in the subsequent pages. By the end of this, the first essay, he gazes upon calm waters in Pleasant Cove, a small seasonal pool made by the ocean waves just opposite where the shipwreck had taken place. “The ocean did not look, now, as if any were ever shipwrecked in it; it was not grand and sublime, but beautiful as a lake. Not a vestige of a wreck was visible, nor could I believe that the bones of many a shipwrecked man were buried in that pure sand.” Thoreau may say he doesn’t believe it, but the image of the dead men in the sand that his remark re-evokes belies his rhetoric, an indelible image that runs through the rest of the book even at its most light-hearted moments, re-emerging long after the travelers have left the wreck behind. I wonder about the dead, the fragments of their bodies scattered through the broad expanses of the beaches I walk across that summer.

Fluctuating between then and now, reading Cape Cod on Cape Cod is a trip, if you’ll excuse the pun. It’s not so much that I’m catapulted to the long Massachusetts shoreline circa 1850, but that Thoreau’s own awareness of what came before him demands that I am similarly aware of Cape Cod’s long tumultuous history. Even when I line up at Provincetown’s popular Portuguese Bakery for one final pastry before boarding the morning ferry to Boston, I find myself wondering how long this place has been here. I discover that it’s probably been around for a hundred years — opened by a Portuguese family to provide alternative nourishment to the fishermen who must have been as sick of the sight of fish as Thoreau was. The sweet fried bread is melt-in-the-mouth amazing and I think back to Thoreau’s last breakfast on the Cape where he’s given a choice between hashed fish or beans. “I took beans,” he writes, “though they were never a favorite dish of mine.” Grateful for the more appealing breakfast options that have appeared since then, I tip some sand out of my shoes, and head to the pier.

I will propose two axioms here, the first completely obvious, the second hopefully less so. One: most writers have a zone of thematic interest they compulsively revisit in their work. Rare is the Flannery O’Connor story without a fraught parent-child relationship; few are the Raymond Carver stories without a bottle of gin lurking on the counter. Two: per Carver and O’Connor, a writer’s greatness tends to be proportionate to, or correlate with anyway, the strength and clarity of these fixations. Great writers have great subjects, and they return to them again and again, like a dog worrying daily over a buried bone.

So it’s interesting when an important author purposefully writes against these tendencies, against themselves. In his recent Lincoln in the Bardo, for example, George Saunders abandons his familiar dystopian terrain, going back in time to achieve something artistically new. Saul Bellow’sSeize the Day, which I recently discussed on my podcast, Fan’s Notes (shameless plug), strikes me similarly. Following the runaway success of The Adventures of Augie March, with its rollicking first-person narration and ambition of scope, Bellow released Seize the Day, a slim novella, and cramped in every sense. The third-person narration is straitjacketed, the setting is an old folks’ home, the action is mostly confined to a single, contentious meal between father and son, and the stakes hinge on $700 worth of lard futures. After Seize the Day, Bellow returned to large books like Henderson the Rain King and Herzog — large in scope, large in voice. Largeness was Bellow’s aesthetic mode, outsized spiritual yearning his native thematic soil. But Seize the Day is a notable aberration, an effortful — though somewhat clumsy and abortive — stab at smallness and bathos.

Regardless of how we evaluate this kind of book’s success, it is gratifying and noteworthy to see a artist pushing against his or her own inclinations and instincts. And so I found it, going through the work of Leonard Michaels to arrive at the Nachman Stories.

The Nachman Stories, as they are informally known, are a cycle of seven pieces bound by a single protagonist, Raphael Nachman, a well-regarded mathematician at UCLA (Michaels himself taught at Berkeley for decades). These stories are terrific, wonderfully written, shot through with an enigmatic, elusive sense of mystery. And they are completely different than anything else Michaels wrote.

Michaels’s great subject was the erotic and the borderlands it shares with other worldly conditions: love, hatred, friendship, confusion, depression, and, in particular, death. Going Places, his first collection, commences with two stories of graphic sexual content — “Manikin,” in which a woman is raped and commits suicide, and the even more representative “City Boy.” Here, the protagonist, caught screwing his girlfriend on the living room floor of her parents’ Manhattan apartment, is banished from the house without clothes, runs to the subway entirely naked only to be denied entry, and upon return to the street is met by his girlfriend, who bears his clothes and the news that her father has suffered a heart attack. They return to the apartment, and celebrate the phone call reporting her father’s survival with another interlude on the floor.

I Would Have Saved Them if I Could, Michaels’s second collection, features “Murderers,” perhaps his most well-known and anthologized story. In it, a group of teenage friends routinely masturbate on the sloping edge of a Brooklyn apartment roof while watching a young rabbi and his wife have sex across the street. One day, a member of the group slides down the roof, tearing his finger off in the process, and plummeting five stories. The naked rabbi screams out the window at them, calling them murderers — a fusing of the carnal and mortal in one indelible moment.

Michaels’s last story collection, A Girl with a Monkey, features a titular story that leads with the following sentence: “In the Spring of the year following his divorce, while traveling alone in Germany, Beard fell in love with a young prostitute named Inger and canceled his plans for further travel.” This strikes me as a characteristic Leonard Michaels sentence, packing loneliness and trauma into a rhetorical sardine tin with the frankly sexual. The story proceeds as you might imagine: sex, sex, regret, folly, sex, regret, sex.

In 1997, six years before his death in 2003, Michaels wrote the first of the Nachman stories, entitled, simply, “Nachman.” In “Nachman,” Raphael Nachman has traveled to Poland for a mathematics conference, where he is informed by the American consul that he will be surveilled by the communist secret police. Nachman responds, “My field is mathematics. Nothing I do is secret, except insofar as it’s unintelligible.” Prodded further with a warning as to the “considerable allure” of Polish women, he elaborates:
I’m not married. I have no secrets. I don’t gossip. I didn’t come to Cracow for romantic adventures. It’s arguable that I’m a freak. You’re wasting your time, Mr. Sullivan, unless you want to make me frightened and self-conscious.
The story proceeds with Nachman touring Cracow’s former Jewish ghetto accompanied by a young female guide who may or may not be a government agent, one of Poland’s famously alluring women. He feels a vague attraction to her, though mainly to her stoic inscrutability, and the story ends with them drinking vodka in a café, Nachman thinking, “For an instant, [he] wished he could love Marie, feel what a man is supposed to feel for a woman, but not for the sake of ecstasy.”

Nachman is an ascetic, and Michaels’s focus on such a character — happy with his pencil and paper, his equations and conferences, and his solitude in a little house in Santa Monica — is arresting. It’s as though Michaels, in order to thwart his habitual mode, had to create a character inoculated against desire. To return to our earlier examples, the equivalent would be a Flannery O’Connor protagonist on pleasant speaking terms with her mother, a Carver character who enjoys a single glass of crisp white wine before bedtime.

What does it profit an author to create a character pitted by nature against its creator’s instincts? In Michaels’s case, backgrounding the erotic charge serves to foreground it — Nachman’s sterile, calm existence is constantly being impinged on by the promise or threat of erotic life. The effect is something like a pristine operating room marked by a bare smudge of mud or a greasy handprint, and the plots of these stories are not unlike a contaminated OR being scrubbed down.

“Of Mystery, There Is No End,” begins as Nachman accidently spies his best friend Norbert’s wife, Adele, kissing a man on the side of Santa Monica Boulevard. This coincidence throws his life into moral turmoil — should he tell Norbert and how? And why does it bother him so? The simple answer seems to be that he has his own feelings for Adele, yet he never acts upon these feelings despite having ample opportunity. He is a man of instinctive restraint, a restraint signally opposed to Michaels’s frank explorations of the bedroom and its consequences. It is only in the last line of the story, chastely lying in bed, that Nachman allows himself to wonder if he is in love with her.

The stifling of this erotic energy tends to position the Nachman Stories in the realm of the metaphysical. It’s as though, absent a release for the ambient sexuality in Michaels’ work, the narrative energy is funneled upward, into — if not the spiritual — the mystical. Nachman’s profession, mathematics, perfectly echoes this quality, in its intellectual self-denial, its abstraction in pursuit of equations that aspire to an almost numinous beauty, a beauty that, in turn, can take aesthetic shape in the real world. In “The Penultimate Conjecture,” Nachman visits a math conference featuring a mathematician named Linquist who claims to have solved a long-standing, famous problem reminiscent of Pierre deFermat’s Last Theorem. Watching the man, Nachman senses the equations are wrong, and the story pivots on his internal struggle: should he speak up and ruin Linquist? He imagines himself and Linquist as medieval knights engaged in mortal combat. Cowering beneath Nachman’s sword, Linquist offers up his slave girl, and thus (as, again, the rumor of sex invades the story’s realm) does Nachman’s fugue end.

The story cycle itself ends with “Cryptology,” in which Nachman has been invited by a shadowy corporation to New York for a cryptology conference. While in the city, he runs into a woman who seems to know him and invites him to dinner; he goes to her apartment only to find her having sex in the shower with her husband, and he flees in mortified dismay. “Cryptology” ends with Nachman in Washington Square Park, calming himself with a vision of home that serves as a perfect imagistic postscript for these stories:
His office and his desk and the window that looked out on the shining Pacific. He’d never gone swimming in the prodigious, restless, teeming, alluring thing, but he loved the changing light on its surface and the sounds it made in the darkness. He didn’t yearn for its embrace.
It is difficult to read these stories, written by a man in his 60s shortly before his death, and not read into them a certain clarity of purpose. Having produced decades of work marked by hectic energy, Michaels’s creation of Nachman seems an attempt to slow things down, to filter the intemperate world through a temperate soul. The sexual is still there in these stories, but it exists less as an act or an actor, and more as atmosphere — background noise that, like the ocean crashing outside Nachman’s window, occasionally intensifies into something audible, becomes for a moment frighteningly present, then just as quickly again subsides.